Company X is a big big company that sells clothes. Company Y is a competitor. Both companies clothing very clearly display their logo.

X calls in a contracting firm to to bid on millions of dollars worth of services. The sales team arrives, bringing along their chief smart person to help the sale. Chief Smart Person is decked out from head to toe in Company Y apparel.

Needlesstosay, the sale did not go through and the firm was told specifically why. The X executive specifically told them that they didn't really seem to take this seriously, so how could they be trusted with the work?

On the other hand - I did a job recently for one of the Big Car Companies. The people there commented that I was driving a car from Other Big Car Company. What did they think I would do, get a car from every company that ever used my firm, and go, "Oh, today it's Company X, I must take the 300?" I'm not paid that well.

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My cousin's memoir of love and loneliness while raising a child with multiple disabilities will be out on Amazon soon! Know the Night, by Maria Mutch, has been called "full of hope, light, and companionship for surviving the small hours of the night."

Company X is a big big company that sells clothes. Company Y is a competitor. Both companies clothing very clearly display their logo.

X calls in a contracting firm to to bid on millions of dollars worth of services. The sales team arrives, bringing along their chief smart person to help the sale. Chief Smart Person is decked out from head to toe in Company Y apparel.

Needlesstosay, the sale did not go through and the firm was told specifically why. The X executive specifically told them that they didn't really seem to take this seriously, so how could they be trusted with the work?

On the other hand - I did a job recently for one of the Big Car Companies. The people there commented that I was driving a car from Other Big Car Company. What did they think I would do, get a car from every company that ever used my firm, and go, "Oh, today it's Company X, I must take the 300?" I'm not paid that well.

Yeah that's kind of ridiculous to expect someone to drive a car they make because you are working for them.

On the other hand, years ago I was doing a project for Frito Lay which is owned by Pepsico. We were working in teams, traveling to different cities and there was always at least two people with us who were actual employees of Frito Lay. We were told as soon as we were hired, when we went out to eat with all the team members, whenever we ordered a drink, we always had to specify a Pepsi product. If we wanted a diet soda, we were to ask for a diet Pepsi, if we were told all they carried was diet Coke, then it was ok to reluctantly agree to having a Coke instead.

I used to work for Safeway, and admitting to occasionally shopping at a rival grocery store was guaranteed to provoke a shocked response. Trouble is, we were all struggling 20-somethings, and occasionally Safeway would prove to be a bit too expensive.

It hired a lot of wives from the local military base (like me). It was amazing how many of us were insured by the car insurance company that gives a special rate to the military and government employees.....and NOT the company that we worked for. Because the other place had a rate which was cheaper for military spouses......

Way back in time, when the US Postal Service was not in financial straits, I read a news article in which a USPS official commented that, if a large corporation wished to formally correspond with the USPS about bidding on a project, sending the correspondence via a courier service might not be the way to make a good impression.

Depending on the type of RFP, there might not be time to send it via USPS. The US Gov't is also very fond of putting an RFP out, receiving questions, sitting on the questions and then updating the proposal only a few days before its due.

This is quite possibly the most rude thing I have ever heard, and I'm not sure it goes here but it seems to:

Big Boss invites several staff members (without spouses) to expensive restaurant as a thank you for a recent project. As Big Boss is settling the check and people are preparing to leave, the waiter comes out with several to-go orders that some of the staff members had placed, taking dinners home to their families.

And no, they weren't paying for them separately but expected big boss to cover it. When questioned, one of them replied "Well, I wasn't home to cook dinner and my family has to eat too!"

Definitely PD.

At the school where I worked Friday was pizza day. Students pre-ordered the number of slices and types of pizza they wanted. We ordered the pizzas from big name chain. We ordered so many every week that the companies would annually bid on selling us the pizzas. Often there would be one or two pizzas left over because the pizza place miscounted or students were ill. The staff were offered these at the school's cost.

Suddenly there were at least 10 extra pizzas each week. The price also went up a dollar. Still a great deal and I had two sons at home, so yahoo. In the middle of the year the cafeteria manager was fired. She had been over ordering, over charging, and using the extra money to pay for her pizzas to take home.

When the principal confronted he told her that she could only order the number of pizzas actually required. She responded that her husband expected her to bring home 5 free pizzas each week.

It turned out that the principal and cafeteria manager had had a running battle over food quality. She wanted him to let her buy prison level quality and take the "savings" as a bonus at the end of the year. His words were basically, "h3ll no, we weren't there to make money off the students."

Yeah that's kind of ridiculous to expect someone to drive a car they make because you are working for them.

On the other hand, years ago I was doing a project for Frito Lay which is owned by Pepsico. We were working in teams, traveling to different cities and there was always at least two people with us who were actual employees of Frito Lay. We were told as soon as we were hired, when we went out to eat with all the team members, whenever we ordered a drink, we always had to specify a Pepsi product. If we wanted a diet soda, we were to ask for a diet Pepsi, if we were told all they carried was diet Coke, then it was ok to reluctantly agree to having a Coke instead.

Well, if I were, say, working full time for Ford, I'd try to drive a Ford (particularly as most car companies will give you a pretty good deal on their own products if you're an employee). However, I am not going to buy a new car because I'm doing a one day job for them.

I suppose I could rent a car of the appropriate brand before I visited each plant, but even that seems a pretty unreasonable expectation for someone who's a vendor, not an employee. I'm not sure how "Mustang rental" would go over on the expense report.

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My cousin's memoir of love and loneliness while raising a child with multiple disabilities will be out on Amazon soon! Know the Night, by Maria Mutch, has been called "full of hope, light, and companionship for surviving the small hours of the night."

Gasoline: My co-workers used to get at my buying gasoline from the cheap gas stations instead of buying our corporate brand. My response was that it usually was that even with our 5-cent/gallon discount, it was less expensive to buy from the no-name stations. Not to mention that it most likely corporate brand gas anyway.

The other thing people would argue with me about was my telling them that 87 gas is pretty much the same in the engine as 91 octane. One woman kept telling me "my BIL is a mechanic and he knows." I would say, "my DH makes the stuff and he knows down to the molecule the formulation of 87, 89, and 91 octane."

Maybe regular Darwinism, not just PD? This picture was taken outside my office today. OSHA has been emailed a copy with date and address. Will let you know if any updates are noticed.

The shirtless man in the jeans is bad enough, he's standing on a fork without using the cage that is designed to lift people in the air on a forklift, but at least he isn't hyper-extended and off balance. The real winner is the one in the red hat who is standing on the lower metal beam edge, leaning forward and hyper-extended and inside the space between the two forks to boot. Both of these people would have been fired from most of the companies I've worked for.

#1:Our lovely supervisor prepares each job for us, setting it out in a particular way so that we know which way around to put things together. New Coworker picked up a new job, decided - on no evidence whatsoever - that it had been set out wrong, turned things around, and got about half way through putting it together inside-out before anyone else noticed.

#2:There's a tag attached to every job we do, with information on who the job is for and details of how it is to be done. EVERYTHING we need to know about how to put it together is ON THE TAG. Task number 1 for every job is READ THE TAG. The first line of the detailed instructions New Coworker has been persistently not reading (and has been reminded, again and again, that she should be reading) is "READ THE TAG".

New Coworker got a job that used materials that would normally have Process A performed on them, but was a bit unusual and in fact required Process B to be used. This was noted on the tag. She did not read the tag and started off blithely with Process A. Our supervisor had to charge across the room yelping "NO NO NO NO NO STOP!" to get to her before she'd totally burked the whole thing up.

This week hasn't been the rolling storm of PD I got to watch last week, but there's still time for her to get a doozy or two in tomorrow.

The shirtless man in the jeans is bad enough, he's standing on a fork without using the cage that is designed to lift people in the air on a forklift, but at least he isn't hyper-extended and off balance. The real winner is the one in the red hat who is standing on the lower metal beam edge, leaning forward and hyper-extended and inside the space between the two forks to boot. Both of these people would have been fired from most of the companies I've worked for.

Exactly what Zyrs described Also, neither employee is wearing PPE--hard hats, gloves, tie-off harnesses. Most construction crews require FRC clothing as well, because welding often happens while others are on-site, yet at least one employee was shirtless. They are working 8-10 feet off the ground without a cage or tie off on potentially wet surfaces. You can't quite tell from the picture, but the sky is stormy and we did have lightning going off in the distance; I wouldn't be touching metal at the moment, nor standing at height on something that's probably wet from the earlier, very recent showers.

A few years ago a man in my town was killed when he fell 5 feet from a fork truck, at a bad angle. Generally people crack down on that now.

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“A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.” CS Lewis

A shirtless man standing on the scoop of a piece of construction equipment, maybe 10-15 feet in the air, doing something to a framework, while someone else stretches upwards while standing on a beam close by.

Rob

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"In all of mankind's history, there has never been more damage done than by someone who 'thought they were doing the right thing'." -- Lucy, Peanuts